Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted's office announced last week that his ongoing investigation into voter fraud has identified 27 people who are not citizens and who voted in Ohio elections. An earlier report by Husted’s office found that 17 “non-citizens” had cast ballots, adding up to a total of 44 illegally cast ballots since 2012.

Ohio Secretary Jon Husted’s office announced last week that his ongoing investigation into voter fraud has identified 27 people who are not citizens, but voted in Ohio elections. An earlier report by Husted’s office found that 17 “non-citizens” had cast ballots, adding up to a total of 44 illegally cast ballots since 2012.

Given these numbers, a mere 0.000006 percent of the 7.7 million registered voters in Ohio cast illegal ballots. Despite the miniscule numbers, Husted hailed the efforts as a success.

“No amount of voter fraud is acceptable and as the state’s chief elections officer it is my responsibility to maintain our voter rolls and ensure only those who are eligible are participating in our elections,” Husted said in a statement.

In 2013, Husted forwarded 17 cases of what appeared to be non-citizen voting during the 2012 presidential election to the Ohio attorney general, resulting in four convictions. Many more voting irregularities were reported by elections officials during the general election, but prosecutors across the state toldCleveland.com that the majority were the result of voter confusion or mistakes by officials.

“Basically, I found that there wasn’t an overwhelming pattern of voter fraud,” Butler County Prosecutor Michael T. Gmoser told the local news outlet. “There’s a couple of isolated incidents of people making bone-headed decisions.”

Husted has admitted as much, saying on Thursday that voter fraud is rare. Still, Husted said he will continue to investigate those voting illegally and called on the federal government to aid him in the process.

Husted, in a February letter to President Obama, said he is worried that the president’s executive action on immigration will increase the number of people voting illegally in the state.

“As chief elections official in a key swing state, I take very seriously my responsibility to make it both easy to vote and hard to cheat by ensuring that only eligible voters may participate in federal, state, and local elections,” he said in a statement about the letter, arguing that the executive action will expand a “loophole” allowing undocumented immigrants to vote.

Some Ohio lawmakers have pointed out that not only has Husted focused on the nonexistent issue of “non-citizen” voter fraud, he also has not taken steps to make voting easier.

“I would like to see the Secretary of State focus on the real problem in our elections instead of playing to his base with these distractions,” Democratic state Rep. Kathleen Clyde said in a statement. “Ohioans deserve answers on why their votes are being thrown out,” she said, in reference to the 10,000 absentee ballots rejected during the 2014 election.

Ohio is one of many states that have painted voter fraud as a rampant threat to elections, using the issue to push legislation that makes casting ballots harder for many Americans who are legally registered to vote, particularly Black Americans.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Saturday that Texas can enforce strict voter identification requirements in the upcoming November election, despite a lower court ruling that the law intentionally discriminates against minority voters.

The Roberts Court rejected the emergency appeal filed by civil rights organizations and the Department of Justice to reinstate a lower court ruling that struck down the Texas voter ID law as unconstitutional. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in her dissent, pointed to Texas’ long history of racially motivated voter ID laws and said the Supreme Court’s ruling could disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Black and Latino voters.

Following a nine-day trial, U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzalez Ramos called the 2011 law the equivalent of a poll tax that had been passed during a “racially charged” legislative session. Gonzalez Ramos concluded that the bills’ sponsors were “motivated, at the very least in part, because of and not merely in spite of the voter ID law’s detrimental effects on the African-American and Hispanic electorate” and that if enforced the law threatened to disenfranchise as many as 600,000 voters, many of them Black or Latino.

“Based on the testimony and numerous statistical analyses provided at trial, this Court finds that approximately 608,470 registered voters in Texas, representing approximately 4.5% of all registered voters, lack qualified SB 14 ID and of these, 534,512 voters do not qualify for a disability exemption,” Gonzalez Ramos wrote.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott (R) appealed Gonzalez Ramos’ decision to the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which put her decision on hold, citing a 2006 Supreme Court opinion that instructs judges not to change voting rules too close to Election Day.

Justice Department attorneys and representatives of civil rights organizations challenging the law filed an emergency appeal with Justice Antonin Scalia, who oversees requests from the Fifth Circuit.

Scalia in turn referred the matter to the entire Supreme Court for consideration.

The Supreme Court order, released early Saturday morning, included a scathing dissent authored by Justice Ginsburg and joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

“The greatest threat to public confidence in elections in this case is the prospect of enforcing a purposefully discriminatory law, one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters,” Ginsburg wrote.

“The potential magnitude of racially discriminatory voter disenfranchisement counseled hesitation before disturbing the District Court’s findings and final judgment,” Ginsburg continued. “Senate Bill 14 may prevent more than 600,000 registered Texas voters (about 4.5% of all registered voters) from voting in person for lack of compliant identification. A sharply disproportionate percentage of those voters are African-American or Hispanic.”

Ginsburg closed by noting that “racial discrimination in elections in Texas is no mere historical artifact. To the contrary, Texas has been found in violation of the Voting Rights Act in every redistricting cycle from and after 1970.”

The Texas voter ID case represents the first time the Court has allowed a law restricting voters’ rights to be enforced after a federal court ruled it unconstitutional because it intentionally discriminates against minorities, according to SCOTUSblog. Saturday’s order by the Roberts Court is not an ultimate ruling on the merits of the Texas voter ID law, which means the fight over Texas voter ID is likely to find its way back before the high court after the Fifth Circuit rules.

This is also the third time since the start of the Court’s term in October that it has intervened in disputes over Republican-led restrictions on voting rights.

Previously, the Court blocked Wisconsin’s voter ID law from being enforced in the November election. And the Court allowed limits on same-day registration, early voting, and provisional ballots in North Carolina and Ohio to take or remain in effect.

The Roberts Court on Thursday night issued an order blocking Wisconsin’s new voter identification law from being enforced in the upcoming November election.

Wisconsin Act 23 mandates voters show one of only nine specific forms of identification in order to voter either by absentee ballot or in person. Wisconsin lawmakers passed the law more than three years ago, but because of ongoing legal challenges to its constitutionality, the restrictions have only been enforced once in a state primary election in 2012.

Two state courts blocked its enforcement in 2012 on the grounds the law violates the Wisconsin Constitution. Meanwhile, a federal trial judge in April ruled that the law violated the U.S. Constitution as well as Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Last month a three-judge panel from the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals issued a temporary order allowing the state to enforce the ID requirements in the November 4 general election.

According to advocates challenging the law, thousands of Wisconsin voters have already cast ballots without producing the kind of ID required, while tens of thousands of voters reportedly do not have the required ID in order to vote November 4.

The one-paragraph, unsigned order offered no reason for blocking the Wisconsin law. Justice Samuel Alito, in a short dissent, concedes that while he would have allowed the restrictions to go into effect, the Supreme Court’s 2006 decision in Purcell v. Gonzalez tells federal courts they should be reluctant to issue orders on state election laws as an election nears.

Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas joined in Alito’s dissent.

This is the second voting rights order issued by the Roberts Court this week. On Wednesday the court allowed changes to North Carolina’s voting laws to go into effect, blocking an earlier order by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. In that case the Fourth Circuit overturned a trial court decision that allowed restrictions on same-day voter registration and out-of-precinct voting to take effect.

In an unrelated case, a federal trial court in Texas blocked that state’s voter ID law, ruling that the state intentionally discriminated against Black and Latino voters in adopting the law.

Thursday’s order blocking Wisconsin’s voter ID requirements will remain in effect while a petition for review of the Seventh Circuit decision is filed and the Roberts Court considers taking the case.

The Fourth Circuit found those two provisions would risk a significant reduction in the voting opportunities for Black voters in North Carolina.

North Carolina’s law places other restrictions on voting as well, but those are not part of the state’s appeal to the Roberts Court. Those restrictions include requiring photo identification to vote, cutbacks to early voting by a week, no voting allowed on the final Saturday before election day, and an end to pre-registering 16- and 17-year-olds in high schools.

The North Carolina law allows any registered voter to challenge ballots cast early or on election day.

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented from Wednesday’s order, saying they would not have granted the stay and that in their view the North Carolina provisions violate civil rights laws, noting that lawmakers in North Carolina passed the voting restrictions just one week after the Roberts Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which struck down a key provision of the 1964 Voting Rights Act.

“The Court of Appeals determined that at least two of the measures—elimination of same-day registration and termination of out-of-precinct voting—risked significantly reducing opportunities for black voters to exercise the franchise in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. I would not displace that record-based reasoned judgment,” Ginsburg wrote for the dissent.

The majority of justices who granted North Carolina’s request did not explain their reasoning in an accompanying opinion.

Wednesday’s order also gives attorneys for the State of North Carolina time to appeal that Fourth Circuit ruling to the Roberts Court. Should the Roberts Court take up North Carolina’s case it would give conservatives on the Supreme Court an opportunity to revisit the provisions of the Voting Rights Act that still stand after its decision in Shelby County.

This is the second time this year the Supreme Court has waded into election laws on the eve of the November midterm elections.

The Court ruled 5 to 4 at the end of September to permit Ohio to cut back sharply on early voting rights. It is also considering a dispute over early voting in Wisconsin, with parties in that challenge filing briefs to the Court this week.

The Roberts Court’s considerable involvement in voting rights cases has been deemed “purely partisan” by a law professor who closely tracks the Court’s decisions.

]]>http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2014/10/09/supreme-court-lets-north-carolina-voting-restrictions-take-effect/feed/1Government-Issued IDs: A Barrier to the Vote, A Barrier to Emergency Contraceptionhttp://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/11/28/government-issued-ids-barrier-to-vote-barrier-to-emergency-contraception/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=government-issued-ids-barrier-to-vote-barrier-to-emergency-contraception
http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/11/28/government-issued-ids-barrier-to-vote-barrier-to-emergency-contraception/#commentsWed, 28 Nov 2012 21:39:03 +0000The use of a government issued ID to suppress the rights of “undesirable” communities is not just limited to voting rights, but is also a barrier for access to over-the-counter emergency contraception.

This past election cycle, we saw the power a government-issued ID can give an individual. In states where voter ID laws were being enforced, individuals who did not have government IDs could not exercise their right to vote. Several communities were adversely affected: transgender people, Latinos, African Americans, students, the elderly, people with disabilities—in short, many, many people. These ID laws harken back to Jim Crow-era poll taxes and “literacy tests,” and at the same time increased the impact of fear tactics used to intimidate voters from going to the polls, exacerbating the historic and current inequities that many communities of color face.

Voting ID laws, and voter suppression in general, also have a unique impact on women of color. Recently, the Center for American Progress issued a report that shows how voter suppression denies justice for women of color. The report finds that many people who are eligible to vote don’t have the appropriate identification they would need to do so, and that this disproportionately impacts people of color—and particularly women of color. While only eight percent of white voters lack proper identification, 25 percent of African American and 16 percent of Latino voters do not possess the needed identification to vote according to these laws. What’s more troubling, some states have required proof of citizenship before individuals vote. According to the CAP report, seven percent of all eligible American voters lack quick access to documents needed to show citizenship, and though 34 percent of women have documents showing citizenship, these documents do not reflect their current legal names. Once you see these numbers, it’s no wonder that women of color are disproportionately impacted by voter suppression efforts. In fact, the CAP report estimates that between 596,000 and 959,000 women of color may have been disenfranchised this past Election Day.

Transgender people, too are uniquely affected by voter ID legislation. Transgender and gender non-conforming people face a complex web of barriers to gaining documents that accurately reflect their gender and name. In fact, a report from the Williams Institute found that 41 percent of transgender citizens do not have documents that reflect their transitions, 74 percent did not have an updated passport, and 27 percent did not have identification documents that reflected their current gender at all. The report also found that transgender and gender non-conforming people of color, students, those with low incomes, and those with disabilities were disproportionately affected. Moreover, in addition to creating barriers to voting, an ID that does not match one’s gender presentation may also expose transgender people to harassment or violence.

The use of a government issued ID to suppress the rights of “undesirable” communities is not just limited to voting rights, however, but is also a barrier for access to over-the-counter emergency contraception. As it stands now, over-the-counter emergency contraception is only available to people over the age of 17, and they must provide government-issued identification. Those under the age of 17 and those who have no government-issued ID must get a prescription. Because having updated and valid government-issued identification is difficult for women and transgender people of color, obtaining emergency contraception over the counter can be difficult or impossible.

Additionally, women, transgender, and gender non-conforming Latin@s are disproportionately represented among the uninsured, making the prospect of getting a prescription for emergency contraception—a time-sensitive drug—that much more costly and burdensome. Moreover, for Latin@s, including undocumented Latin@s, many other obstacles may affect access to the care they need in a timely fashion: financial costs, lack of linguistically and culturally competent providers, stigma, and lack of transportation.

Critics may say that individuals who cannot access over the counter EC should just use other forms of over the counter contraception on a regular basis, such as condoms and spermicide, but let’s face it: not all individuals are in healthy relationships, cost may be a barrier for these methods as well, but most importantly, sometimes birth control methods fail. The bottom line is that all individuals should have real access to a wide range of birth control options so that they can truly exercise and enjoy their bodily autonomy.

]]>http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/11/28/government-issued-ids-barrier-to-vote-barrier-to-emergency-contraception/feed/0In America, Our Inalienable Right to Vote is in Jeopardyhttp://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/09/20/right-to-vote-is-an-inalienable-right-in-jeopardy/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=right-to-vote-is-an-inalienable-right-in-jeopardy
http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/09/20/right-to-vote-is-an-inalienable-right-in-jeopardy/#commentsThu, 20 Sep 2012 07:06:50 +0000Millions of U.S. citizens will not be allowed to vote in the upcoming presidential election; restrictions on who is allowed to vote and how are based on two erroneous assumptions.

]]>The right to vote is an illusion for me: I have been allowed to vote only once in my more than two decades as an emancipated adult. But while I have never been completely at peace with this disenfranchisement, it is the consequence of my personal choice to migrate early and often: my home country, Denmark, extends only limited democratic rights for citizens living abroad.

It is, however, not a choice for the millions of U.S. citizens who will not be allowed to vote in the upcoming presidential election, either because they have been convicted of a felony, or because they are excluded from voting through voting roll purges, strict voter ID laws, or existing or new restrictions on when and how eligible citizens are allowed to vote.

These restrictions on who is allowed to vote and how are based on two erroneous assumptions.

The first and most easily dismissed assumption is that voter fraud is rampant in the United States, requiring stricter regulations on new voter registration, voter ID requirements, and limits on voting hours. This notion is so obviously false that it has been debunked numerous times by independent watchdog organizations and in the mainstream media. Latest figures show that about one in 16,000 registered voters might have a problem, though some issues are neither intentional nor malicious but rather the result of people moving, changing their signature, or misspelling the name of the city in which they live.

Unfortunately, widespread voter fraud is a notion that has traction with those who already believe the United States consists of the deserving and the undeserving. In this way, some commentators conflate welfare recipients, urban residents, and individuals likely to engage in voter fraud. More damningly, non-governmental groups ostensibly working to verify voter registers across the country have seemingly been targeting counties with predominantly minority populations, or low-income communities, using methods that have been discredited by government agencies, such as the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board. Just this weekend, the New York Times reported that some are so focused on proving fraud that they fabricate the proof. As a result, hundreds of legitimate voters have been purged from registers.

These efforts are usually partisan. The ongoing case in Ohio, in which the state government is seeking to strike down early voting in selected districts and for selected populations, has the possibility of preventing more registered Democrats than Republicans from accessing polls on non-work days.

The second assumption behind the exclusion of voters in the United States is that voting is a privilege and not a human right. International human rights treaties define the equal right and opportunity to vote and to be elected in genuine periodic elections as key to democracy, peace, and human dignity. And while the United States is historically reluctant to sign on to international human rights obligations, the U.S. Senate accepted the ongoing obligation to implement the right to vote as defined in international law in 1992.

To be sure, some will say that the millions of convicted felons who are excluded from voting for life have brought it upon themselves and do not deserve to participate in democracy. No amount of data showing the disproportionate (and perhaps intentional) impact of this policy on communities of color will convince this group that those convicted of crimes should not be excluded from voting. The notion that voting as a human right means there can be no distinction between the deserving and the undeserving will also not have any impact: people who believe that those convicted of felonies should lose all rights for life do not believe in human rights at all.

So far, politicians have assumed they have support for voter ID laws because some three-quarters of the U.S. population poll in favor of these laws. However, the same polls show an almost equal concern among the population that legitimate voters will be excluded from the polls in November. The difference between these two concerns is that the latter is real and the former is largely fabricated, as is the worry that those convicted of felonies are undeserving of the right to vote.

More to the point, ensuring the right to vote should not be based on polling data. The U.S. government—including both the executive and the legislative branches—has the obligation to ensure that the right to vote is more than an illusion for all U.S. citizens, regardless of their ethnicity, home, or history of conflict with the law.

]]>http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/09/20/right-to-vote-is-an-inalienable-right-in-jeopardy/feed/0Soy Poderosa: Why Millennial Latinas Lead in Texas and Beyondhttp://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/08/12/soy-poderosa-why-millennial-latinas-lead-in-texas-and-beyond/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=soy-poderosa-why-millennial-latinas-lead-in-texas-and-beyond
http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/08/12/soy-poderosa-why-millennial-latinas-lead-in-texas-and-beyond/#commentsSun, 12 Aug 2012 21:48:28 +0000As a young working professional Poderosa, as a college graduate, and as I have seen in communities across the Americas, I know first-hand intelligent and motivated Millennial Latinas achieve and overcome what some would consider insurmountable obstacles.

This profile of Hemly Ordonez is one of several of powerful Latina women advocates throughout the United States.

As a young working professional at Poderosa, as a college graduate, and as I have seen in communities across the Americas, I know first-hand intelligent and motivated Millennial Latinas achieve and overcome what some would consider insurmountable obstacles. They have not only met their challenges head-on but have come to achieve success at multiple levels. At the age of 14, I staged my first sit-in and I have been a poderosa organizer and policy nerd in local communities ever since. I did not have the words then to describe what intrinsically motivated me to confront perceived obstacles. I followed the example of my mother and father, who were youth activists in Guatemala prior to the civil war before they came to the United States as undocumented immigrants. Through them I understood the importance of garnering collective power to close the gaps in equality. I continued on my journey as an ally supporting the effort to create a Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) in my high school and founding a youth empowerment conference on higher education so my cousins could access the tools they needed. I was unapologetic about embracing all of my identities and worked tirelessly to protect my dignity and my family’s dignity.

I have seen this quality in the Millennial Latinas (and Latinos) that I have had the privilege of working with. As the State Strategies Coordinator at Advocates for Youth, I have had the honor of partnering with the Texas Freedom Network Student Chapters through our Cultural Advocacy and Mobilization Initiative. They are one of our eight state partners that support Millennial leaders and have specifically worked with Latina leaders to improve sex education policy in Texas. Through tireless advocacy in their local communities Millennial Latina youth activists like Rebecca Treviño, Deborah Paz, and April Flores are challenging the political landscape to improve sex education. These poderosas have hosted in-district lobby days, entered public comments at school board meetings, gathered petition signatures for the Education Works Bill, trained their peers, and tabled at community events. They are spokes – poderosas defending access to women’s reproductive health services and stood with Planned Parenthood in their local communities of Brownsville, El Paso, and San Marcos pushing back on Texas Governor Rick Perry. These women lead their communities to push back against the dysfunctional attitudes toward sexuality in Texas and to build space for all Latinas to thrive.

Rebecca, Deborah and April are following a strong multicultural tradition of women of color who must lead in order to preserve our families, our cultures, our communities, and our own political enfranchisement. They are working to hold the state of Texas accountable and ensure that their vote counts. They are pushing back against the threat of voter suppression.

My foremothers carved a path of resistance that propels me to lead every day. These Latinas along with all the student chapter leaders from the Texas Freedom Network represent Millennial women and men leading in their communities.

The slow bigotry of low expectations has birthed a myth that Millennials do not lead and more perniciously that Millennial women do not lead. I am one Latina of a cadre of Millennial women, along with our youth activists in Texas, who are leading micro-movements and tracking policy. We are demonstrating through our actions that Millennial Latinas son Poderosas.

Hemly Ordonez is the State Strategies Coordinator at Advocates for Youth and oversees the Cultural Advocacy and Mobilization Initiative.

]]>http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/08/12/soy-poderosa-why-millennial-latinas-lead-in-texas-and-beyond/feed/1The Voter ID Struggle in Pennsylvania: Losing ID Is about Losing More than the Right to Votehttp://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/08/08/voter-id-struggle-in-pennsylvania-losing-far-more-than-right-to-vote/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=voter-id-struggle-in-pennsylvania-losing-far-more-than-right-to-vote
http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/08/08/voter-id-struggle-in-pennsylvania-losing-far-more-than-right-to-vote/#commentsWed, 08 Aug 2012 07:53:54 +0000

We’re taking up a collection at my office, here at the Media Mobilizing Project in Philadelphia, PA, for some of our radio producers and campaigners.

We’re taking up a collection at my office, here at the Media Mobilizing Project in Philadelphia, PA, for some of our radio producers and campaigners.

For six years, we’ve believed that the right to speak means little without the right to be heard—and hundreds of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania residents have agreed with us. We’re poor and working people producing media that tells the untold stories of people in Pennsylvania—and developing those people into leaders united to change our city and state. We’re a tight crew, so when folks are having trouble, we come together to help each other out. One young man, Marco (not his real name), is a producer at Radio Unidad, Philadelphia’s only Spanish-language community news show. Andres and Paulita (not their real names) are leaders in another immigrant rights campaign that’s been meeting since January. Even though they work hard, support families, and in many cases own homes and pay taxes–the state has unceremoniously cancelled their drivers’ licenses, saying that the Tax ID numbers they used to get their licenses aren’t proof enough of their right to live in the US.

But they have families to support, and work to do. So they get in their cars and drive— hoping for the best. But they were stopped by the police, and charged fines of several hundred, up to a thousand dollars, for driving without licenses. They need to drive to work, to pay those fees. And they might get stopped again, and again—and their hard-earned money will go to filling the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation’s coffers. And that’s what gets me.

As Charlene Carruthers said in her powerful piece on the relationship between voter suppression and reproductive rights, the current fight to make sure that thousands of Pennsylvanians without ID get to vote is important—vital—to making sure that our communities get to the polls to make important decisions on the direction of our state and country. Recent data from the Pennsylvania Department of State, processed and analyzed by the labor federation AFL-CIO, shows that 20 percent of Pennsylvania voters—and 43 percent of Philadelphia voters—might not possess ID valid enough to get them into the voting booth. But we need to understand two things.

First – when states take away ID from poor and working folks, or limit poor and working people’s access to getting ID in the first place – those people lose far more than their right to vote. They often lose their right to work, to bank without exorbitant fees, to get benefits for which they and their family qualify, and, as noted, to drive even though they’ve passed a drivers’ test. They become even more invisible in our society, and state governments and corporations profit off of their struggle to meet their and their families’ daily needs.

And second, when the state limits access to ID and access to society unless you have a valid ID, it also takes away the rights of multiple communities, in many locations in the state, from many different kinds of people who need ID for different reasons. When the electorate is divided—immigrants from citizens, poor from near and new poor, working class from middle class—everyone loses. In order to change that reality, we need to do more than re-empower folks without ID to get their chance to vote… though that matters. First, we need to frame the voter ID fight as one that unites everyone who has lost access to the tools necessary to build a dignified life–no matter where they live and who they are. We need to do the hard movement-building work of uniting poor and working people across rural and urban, race, and origin lines so Pennsylvanians are powerful enough to never lose their right to vote again.

Bringing the voices together: What you lose when you lose your ID

After years of knitting together student, immigrant, low-wage worker, and other communities across Philadelphia with community media production, storytelling, and study and leadership development programs, we trained a team of 30 folks to canvass areas of Philadelphia that probably haven’t had a door knocked by an organizer for a little while. MMP leaders—poor and working people from across the city—fanned out in the neighborhood around 52nd and Sansom, a low-income West Philly area where the city had ordered rolling brownouts and regular closures of local fire stations in an attempt by Mayor Nutter to save money in a growing budget crisis.

We surveyed residents on the struggles they were facing–learning about folks getting by without jobs, without healthcare, with aging relatives or young kids to support. We cared about the context: What did it mean when Philly cuts services in your community, when you’re already going through so much?

As we knocked on doors, we met one gentleman who had served time in prison, but who’d been home, back in his community, for 12 years. For all that time, he hasn’t had an ID.

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University has described how recent laws passed in Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and a handful of other states will affect the rights of Americans to vote. But the right to vote might be the smallest thing on the minds of people locked out of society without an ID.

Ex-offenders find it challenging to get IDs, a necessary first step to applying for and securing a job that allows someone coming home from prison to leave behind street hustles or other ways or making money. As recently as 2007, Michigan parolees were given parole ID cards with a prison photo and ID number, but, according to the Michigan Poverty Law Program, parolees couldn’t use these cards to secure state services, or exchange their ID for a state one.

One Pennsylvania group, Impact Services Corporation, has helped more than 3000 ex-offender Pennsylvanians connect to jobs and more than 1000 get the IDs they need after serving their sentences. But, according to Impact, 35,000 ex-offenders return to Philadelphia alone each year from local, state, or federal prisons. Groups like Impact are helping, but ex-offenders need more. Having an ID is the first step.

(Oh, and of course, ex-offenders have the right to vote in Pennsylvania, but if they can’t get IDs, now they really can’t vote).

Residents without ID are locked out of affordable digital access and all the deals and purchasing power online access provides. Comcast, the cable, broadband, voice over IP phone and NBC content company, rules the roost in Philly, where it is headquartered here and serves as the major telecom provider. But in order to get Comcast service, you need to have a credit history (hard to establish without valid ID), pay a large deposit, or prove who you are at a Comcast Service Center with a social security number or driver’s license. Without online access, poor and working people also don’t have access to many of the tools that allow people to get out of poverty. It’s hard to research scholarships for school, job opportunities, and available government benefits if you can’t get online. You can’t even get a MegaBus ticket for the most affordable advertised price of $1, find inexpensive hotels or plane tickets (not that you could get on a plane or into a hotel without ID), or invest hard earned money to make it work for you.

Without ID: A shared struggle of millions of poor and working people in the US

Some of the folks in Pennsylvanis who don’t have ID are undocumented immigrants. Some are people who’ve served their time. Others are seniors who have never needed papers to prove who they were in towns where they raised children and grandchildren. More are folks who have reason to distrust a system increasingly interested in asking residents for papers, or folks who had ID and haven’t gotten a chance to get it renewed. But most importantly, when State Representative Mike Turzai said that requiring voter ID would allow Governor Romney to win the state, he likely wasn’t just thinking of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh; and he probably wasn’t just thinking about the top of the ticket. Pennsylvania has kept an overwhelming Republican majority in the State Senate for over ten years, and a majority Republican house since 2010, a majority they aim to increase and solidify, by isolating poor and working people from each other.

While unemployed people in Philadelphia are primarily people of color, 75 percent of those without jobs in the rest of the state are white, according to the Pennsylvania Department of State. And according to estimates made based on the 2010 Census, more rural people than urban residents are poor (14.2 percent percent instead of 13.2 percent, and that’s just according to the stingy federal definitions of poverty.

We need to fight against this voter ID law. And we need to win. But media messages and government policies have divided us in the cities from our natural community in smaller cities and rural areas in this state and in this country. What does uniting across these geographies, and across race and color lines, look like?

Carmen Cuadrado lives in a North Philly community that the city of Philadelphia calls “blighted.” When she saw her neighbors lose their homes for pennies on the dollar, she joined with Rosemary Cubas’ Community Leadership Institute to save her neighbors’ homes. “I joined Community Leadership Institute because I knew that it was needed in the area,” says Carmen, “And I’d seen that redevelopment was just a way of moving us—the low income families—out of our neighborhood.”

After years of learning and leading at MMP, Carmen is now a member of our Executive Committee. As part of our listening and storytelling campaign, she travelled with other MMP leaders across the state to collect stories that show how much our struggles have in common. They met with residents of Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania’s Riverdale Village Mobile Home Park, 37 families that are being evicted from their community to make way for a water extraction plant that will supply natural gas fracking operations.

“Now that I own my own place… now, I’m losing it,” said Amber Daniels in the video MMP produced with this community. “For once in my life, and now I’ve got to give it up, either go live in a camper, or under a bridge. Where else do you have to go?”

In talking together, Carmen, other MMP members, and Jersey Shore leaders saw that poor homeowners in North Philly and rural trailer park communities in central PA had something powerful in common. MMP and other groups in Pennsylvania—and in other states across the country—are working to bring us together as a true 99 percent. While we must invest now in the struggle to make sure that we can vote, consider the power we will wield when thousands, millions of votes each represent an informed, powerful person united with their brothers and sisters. We are working to see ourselves as a class of people who, united, can make sure that no state government ever has the power to take away our right to vote—or to live in dignity—again.